


with sweet delight ye do abound

by InfiniteCalm



Category: Grantchester (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Daniel loves Leonard, Leonard loves Daniel, M/M, Mrs C POV, Mrs C character Growth Gang, Period-Typical Homophobia, S05E06, from people not trying to be homophobic, i fix the birthday present scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:54:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23055838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InfiniteCalm/pseuds/InfiniteCalm
Summary: Following on from what she's learned, Mrs C attempts to understand her friend.Set during the closing scenes of the series 5 finale
Relationships: Leonard Finch & Sylvia Maguire, Leonard Finch/Daniel Marlowe
Comments: 14
Kudos: 37





	with sweet delight ye do abound

**Author's Note:**

> What's up gang, here we are now at the end of season 5 which went... in good and bad directions. I liked it?! I have rewritten the birthday present scene because it's very very stupid and I want it to not be stupid. oh also i see other fill-in-the-blanks fic and it's all fab! ive been working on this since the ep aired so any cross-over is coincidental :)
> 
> CW: period-typical homophobia from characters who are ignorant that they actually are homophobic... or they have an enlightened view for the time period in which they live. Which can sometimes be a lot worse!! Let me know if I need to warn more specifically. Oh also there's a lighthearted joke about Catholicism in here.

Mrs C hears everything. That a father could say those things to the only family he’s got left- that Leonard’s family could say those things to Leonard, that Leonard himself was not exaggerating or being overwrought when he made requests that she not antagonise the man- it all beggars belief.

Leonard follows up his father’s threats with the strongest words she’s ever heard him speak. The content of his little speech is not appropriate for any level of company, let alone company outdoors, in the broad daylight. Still, she reproves herself, it’s not _wrong_ to be feeling slightly proud of him. He’d never have made such a declaration when he first arrived. He’d been meek and ineffectual, and now it seems he has nipped a blackmail attempt in the bud.

(In love. Happy. Has she ever been so forthright about those things? Has she ever dug her heels in and demanded her right to be either?)

And _what_ a blackmail attempt. Imagine trying to blackmail your own flesh and blood! Whatever about anyone’s predilections in this area; there’s no Heaven for men who do not honour their families. She has no doubt that Leonard must have tried hard to win his father over- Goodness knows he was persistent enough when she and her Jack were having their difficulties-

Oh, well now, Sylvia, she thinks, huffing. Look at what comes of being lost in thought. Leonard breezes past where she’s waiting in the doorway, ignoring her, and begins to head up the stairs. He stops halfway up and angrily wipes his eyes with his sleeve. Something makes him turn on his heel and head straight back out, and Sylvia thinks he might try to go and catch up with his father until she sees the familiar path he’s beating.

 _Imagine_ reacting to an olive branch by saying that! Sylvia does not like children, is glad her day-to-day life doesn’t involve much contact with them, and is not sorry that she never had any herself. But her nieces and nephews were very dear to her, especially when they were small; she can’t even contemplate saying that kind of thing to any of them.

He’ll be wanting something hot and sweet, to get over the shock. To be honest, she thinks, he’ll be wanting his mother, at a time like this, but tea will have to substitute for that. Poor lamb.

He’s a 35-year-old man, of course, she reflects as the kettle boils, not any sort of lamb anymore. He should be well on his way to a wife and family at this stage, as she keeps telling him.

…She should stop telling him that. It’s a heavy thought. A leopard can’t change his spots, after all, and it seems like she’s not the only one who’s pressed the issue.

The light is falling on the kitchen table in a way that gives her déja vu. She remembers when Mr Marlowe was welcome to pop over to the vicarage whenever he was free, and how he used to offer to help her with her work.

She never saw Leonard as happy as when he was serving Mr Marlowe tea at this table, and that’s a fact. Almost more of an intimate moment than the kiss she interrupted, she thinks. The pleased way Mr Marlowe’s face lit up, Leonard’s little flourish as he set the tray down.

She supposes Leonard must have wanted a family very much, if he’d been willing to sacrifice the possibility of- conjugal- love for it (though she’s happy that that Hillary girl seems to have come to her senses before anyone did something irreversibly regrettable), and her constant bringing it up may be doing everyone more harm than good. Hm.

Well, regardless of any of that. Leonard is up there alone, and he shouldn’t be.

Not for the first time, she wonders what sort of a woman Leonard Finch’s mother was. Her son, in his own words, is now unafraid and unashamed- _there is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear,_ Sylvia thinks, and is then annoyed at herself for even daring to connect The Gospel with an Earthly situation such as this one- the kettle boils. She locks the door carefully on her way out. The dog whines as she leaves. Spoiled thing. She heads up to the church.

He’s less upset than she thought he would be. Initially there are no tears, though he’s clearly deep in prayer, and she feels strange disturbing him. He prays sincerely and deeply, with an idiosyncratic understanding of the workings of it that she doesn’t quite share. He focuses more on gratitude than any clergyman she’s ever met. His favourite hymn is _All Creatures of Our God and King_ , for God’s sake. She knows that St Francis didn’t have a choice in what church he belonged to. But that doesn’t mean that one should enjoy a hymn written by a Catholic quite so much.

She’s avoiding the topic at hand again, and hovering, not sure now whether he wants her there.

“Please sit down, Mrs C,” Leonard says. She keeps the flask in her bag. Neither the time nor the place.

She realises her first impression of his mood was wrong. He’s distraught, pale and shaking, and clearly not very well at all. But as ever, he takes her feelings into consideration, and knowing how she reacts to big displays of emotion, is trying not to overwhelm her. She’s bigger and stronger than he thinks she is, and she’s had far worse things than a very kind, very hurt man try to tell her that he considers her his family. She doesn’t know what to make of him anymore, only that she’s moved by his candour.

She leaves him praying with steadier hands than when she found him. On the road back to the vicarage, she can’t shake the stilted way he listed the members of his family.

 _Your son likes men_. Not afraid, for the first time. Perhaps she hurt him a bit more than she intended to, last year. And she’s never apologised for it. And it’s too late now.

-

The cake for tomorrow is chilling in the fridge and she’s got the kitchen nearly cleaned up. Even really going at the bathroom fixtures with windolene doesn’t shift the unpleasant feeling in her stomach. She can’t wait to get home tonight. Sylvia is steadfastly ignoring the clock, but Leonard arrives home a little after half-six, hours after she left him.

“Will’s not back yet,” he explains. He looks absolutely exhausted. She supposes being disowned will do that to a person. “I thought I’d go and visit Mr Moore and Evie Sutton, seeing as they’re so ill. And then some of the mothers were getting a little jumpy about the fete, and Mr Nowell needed to talk about the baby’s baptism.”

“You sit down,” she says to Leonard, instead of responding that with anything along the lines of “that’s not your job”. Will should be doing all of that, but it wouldn’t do any good to say so (especially not to Will himself). Leonard slumps down at the kitchen table and doesn’t eat much, only drinks his tea and stares out the window. They don’t speak. Something about the bright August sunset outside is implying the drawing in of the evenings. There’s a chill in the air.

“You’re still seeing that man, that Mr Marlowe, aren’t you.” Sylvia asks him.

Leonard doesn’t reply. He looks up at the ceiling and the bags under his eyes suddenly appear a lot more prominent with the change in the angle of light hitting his face. She won’t push it. He’s not up for it tonight. She leaves him on the sofa in the living room, with another tea and biscuits that he won’t touch, and she goes home to her loving lovely husband.

-

When she tells Jack about what happened, he just smokes his pipe and nods sagely.

“Knew he was a bad ‘un,” he says, on the topic of the older Mr Finch.

Sylvia doesn’t know where she gets the energy to deal with them all. Sometimes it feels like her life is made up solely of incompetent men.

“What do you think of men… of that persuasion?” she asks her husband.

“Queers?” He says. She sighs, audibly. “You know what I think, Missus. It’s not his fault, and it’s not hurting anyone. You know they’re saying it’s a sickness, nowadays.”

“Strange kind of sickness,” Sylvia mutters, and she thinks if she were to put it like that- you’re ill- to Leonard, he would reject the notion out of hand. Something about his posture in the garden this morning. “Seems like if it were a sickness you could cure it.”

Jack shrugs as if to say, “what do I know?”, and on this topic she finds she must respond with a glance that says, “not much”.

Later that evening, when she is safe in bed with her husband snoring cheerfully away beside her, though, she has to wonder. Leonard, despite her being unbearably fond of him- the law shouldn’t involve emotion, and she knows that even though God’s law isn’t truly enforceable on Earth, the same rules should apply to that, and she should look at the decision as an impartial observer, and see what God says, and God- and thousands of years of civilisation- are clear on the matter. The King James bible and the Church of England have rules and guidelines for a reason. They’ve served her well her whole life long, and to just ignore them now because it’s _hard_ is not how that’s supposed to work.

But what is she supposed to do? The parish would be lost without him, and he’s good at his job, and to her knowledge has not deliberately hurt anyone since he arrived, which is, again, more than she can say for their current vicar. He’s doing so much good for everyone here. But then sin isn’t like that, it’s not like putting more potatoes in a stew to make up for a lack of beef. It’s not a weighing scales. It doesn’t cancel out.

Funny how you can do everything right your whole life and still end up tortured over things like this. Nothing like family for doing that to you, she thinks.

-

She’s so busy with birthday party preparations the next day that it falls to Leonard to make them lunch. It’s surprisingly edible. She supposes he must have learned when he was a boy, if what she’s pieced together out from his half-stories is anything to go by. Not a patch on anything she could have made (as everyone will see tonight) but then, he might just be out of practise. They sit companionably at the table and listen to the news.

Leonard’s birthday celebrations are usually muted affairs. The last one was on a Sunday, which she thinks he may have appreciated. He doesn’t like them throwing parties, and seems surprised when they offer cards. Sylvia still remembers the first year he was with them, how disturbed she was by the shock on his face at the lacklustre present she and Sidney had dredged up. The fact that he’d been thought of at all seemed to take him aback.

Will, on the other hand, has been hinting that he would like something to cheer him up this year, possibly because he’s turning 29 and that’s an age when one should really start to think about settling down, and he does not seem to want to start thinking about settling down.

Leonard has to go and meet with the Nowells about the baptism, and Sylvia will be finished up soon. After that, she has an hour or two to fill, somehow, before she has to start putting things in the oven.

Well. There is one option. The dog does need walking. And if she were to end up around the meadow, well, he does like that walk, and she needs to clear her head, after the last few days. Water is good for that, going walking along rivers. Etc. 

She glances over at the door just in time to see Leonard begin to ready himself to leave the house. He bends down to pet the dog and buries his face in its fur. It takes him a long time to stand up. One slow, deep breath, then he fixes his face, and opens the door. There’s something lonely in it, she thinks.

-

The dog knows which way they’re walking, which Sylvia takes as proof enough that Leonard takes him along this route more often than not. Dickens automatically slows down when he arrives at Mr Marlowe’s house, which is a relief; Sylvia didn’t know which one was his.

She knocks on the door, and steels herself.

Mr Marlowe, dressed nicely (though the suede shoes are a little much, she thinks) appears at the door, face expectant. His eyes narrow when they meet hers. He stands there in silence for a long time, arms crossed in front of him. The only sound is the chirping of the birds, some distant children laughing.

“I suppose you want to come in,” he says eventually, and stands aside, letting the dog nuzzle at his legs. “Leave Dickens off the lead, he won’t run away.”

She wants to say, _I know, he’s_ my _dog,_ but the fact is that she didn’t actually know that. She steps inside, and doesn’t burst into flame.

“You can sit down in the parlour,” Mr Marlowe says, his tone icy, showing her into the room. He doesn’t follow her in; she assumes he’s gone into the kitchen when she hears the wireless cutting off, the sounds of washing-up in the sink.

Sylvia looks around the parlour. It’s a comfortable room, the gramophone in pride of place, a large collection of records carefully stored on the shelves behind it. The view out the windows is lovely; he must spend a lot of time in that garden. For a bachelor’s cottage it’s very well kept; clean, stylish. One of Leonard’s jumpers is cast over the chair. One of his books is on the low table. More evidence of his taste hangs around the room, though not so obviously… the warm throw over the back of the sofa, the slippers beside the chair she’s sitting in, the photograph she can’t really make out on the far wall… the two of them, she supposes it must be.

The door opens.

“You’re lucky I let you in at all,” Daniel says, and Sylvia rises to her feet. If it’s to be like _that_ then she doesn’t want to be sitting down.

“I’m sorry?” She asks. “You don’t even know what I’ve come here to say.”

“Who do you think you are, banning me from the vicarage? From seeing him? We’re both grown men, Mrs Chapman, and you don’t actually own that house.” Mr Marlowe is standing very still. He’s not a tall man, but Sylvia sees him suddenly as a little imposing. She straightens her spine. If it’s an apology he wants, he’ll be sorely disappointed. She was acting as best she knew how, according to the circumstances.

“I never banned you from anywhere,” she sniffs. “It was a condition of my employment that the clergy in that house would act in a Godly manner. If that excluded visits from you, well, that’s not my fault.”

Mr Marlowe raises an eyebrow, and doesn’t react for a few seconds. She realises he’s counting to ten, and wonders if that means he’ll calm down or if it’ll just stave off a louder attack. She wonders what Leonard’s told him.

“You’re lucky, you know, that he was so lonely when he came here first. You’re lucky that he loves you so much. I don’t get the impression that you appreciate that as much as you should, Mrs Chapman.”

“And how would you get an impression of that? We barely speak.”

She feels righteous fury well up inside, and has to remind herself of why she’s come here, and that it’s natural that this man (introduced to Leonard, she might add, when he was the chief suspect in the murder case of a young girl!) might be angry at her. She can take whatever he wants to throw at her; they both know she’s got the power here.

“If you appreciated him, you’d try better to understand.”

His presumption takes her aback.

“You _expect_ people to try to understand this?” She asks him, and she can hear the emotion leaking into her voice.

“If they love him, then yes, I do.”

“Did you expect _your_ loved ones to do it?”

“I don’t believe that’s any of your business, Mrs Chapman,” Daniel Marlowe says. “But for your information, it’s a more complicated question than you seem to think it is. My mother, for example, is happy.”

“She’s happy that you’re- this way.”

“No.” He says, and she notices his mouth setting, for a split-second, into an upset little line. And then it’s gone. He doesn’t elaborate. She has an image of Mr. Finch striding away, threatening his son. She thinks of her own mother. She thinks, again, of her nieces and nephews.

“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” she says, and he takes the conciliatory statement for what it is, letting his shoulders relax and exhaling audibly. He opens his palm to show her to the armchair again, and she sits, and watches him do the same.

“What would you like to say, Mrs Chapman,” he asks, and she considers her options.

“Leonard’s father left… unreconciled with his son, you might say,” she says, and Mr Marlowe winces. She notices how his hands rest on his knees, like Leonard’s do, and wonders. “And I thought… that perhaps I wasn’t being quite fair.”

“Well, that’s certainly a start,” Mr Marlowe says, and she’s about to bristle at the impertinence of it again when she looks closer, and sees the expression on his face, and realises that he’s not being quite serious.

Another thing about when Mr Marlowe was a regular guest at the vicarage: Leonard did a lot more- he went to the cinema. He attended readings and public lectures at the university. When Mr Marlowe was- no longer in the picture- he still went to the pictures (try and stop him, Will had laughed) but not so frequently. And he didn’t talk about poetry (she’d not, at the time, thought that was a bad thing) and, she realises, he’d stopped tuning in to Women’s Hour quite so religiously while she was around.

She lets the silence hang in the air, though.

“Listen, Mrs Chapman. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’ve always done right by him, either,” Mr Marlowe sighs. “But I’m just going to say this next thing, and then you never have to talk to me again. Even if we are almost family, in a way.”

She’s about to nip _that_ in the bud before realising that he’s right. In a way. She motions for him to go on and speak.

He continues. “Leonard is… you know he’s not had it easy. It’s not _easy,_ being the way he is. I don’t just mean homosexual, either, though it’s certainly linked to that… and people on the street, you know, coppers and so on, you expect nonsense from them, but… from people that you love, to get it from them, it’s different. Do you see?”

“I can- see that it might be. I can see where you’re coming from.”

“I just want you to know that you’re not seeing how brave he is. Because he is brave, it’s brave to be that kind, you know, to be that- to care as much as he does.”

She thinks about that. Leonard has never struck her as particularly brave. Quite the opposite, sometimes. He didn’t even serve in the war, as far as she knows, and God knows there were plenty of opportunities. Surely a man so timid couldn’t be called courageous?

But then, it’s not like he’s run away from what frightens him. So that, in a way, might be just as brave as Sidney Chambers ever was.

“Mr Marlowe, I’d like to invite you to Mr Davenport’s birthday dinner later on this evening,” she says, “seeing as he is your great friend.”

And as they iron out the details, he’s quite a bit warmer towards her than he was at the doorstep.

-

Of course, she completely forgets to tell Leonard about what she’s done. Leonard looks at her like she’s in the process of kicking a child, and at Mr Marlowe like he’s being led to the gallows. The resulting tension is excruciating, as Leonard is forced, she sees, to make a decision here in front of a room full of children that she thinks he might not have made otherwise. And that hurts Mr Marlowe’s feelings, though what else was he rationally supposed to have done? It’s a mess.

So, she sorts it out, as she always has.

The look they share then might be classed as indecent, if looks could be classed that way. She’s never seen Leonard like it; tall, strong, but not rigid, that smile she remembers from last year on his face, and his eyes wide.

 _In love. Happy._ Well, she thinks, didn’t the Good Lord put all sorts on the planet, and didn’t he make someone for everyone? Beside her, Mr Marlowe is completely still, like someone after a great shock, or a groom at the altar when the bride walks in.

 _That_ is a comparison she will not encourage- not appropriate in the slightest. What is she thinking, really. God Bless Will for breaking the tension, though she’s not sure if the children noticed it. Or maybe they did, but they don’t have the words to describe it, and so they ignore it. Mr Marlowe breaks eye contact with a rueful sigh.

They stay a plausible-deniability’s distance from each other for the rest of the evening. Sylvia’s not sure how to feel about that, until she catches them gazing (again?) at each other. Engrossed in two separate conversations- Cathy chatting to Mr Marlowe about the economy, and Leonard defending the importance of faith to Esme- they nod over at each other, with a kind of humour, a kind of non-verbal check-up, a smile shared without actually smiling. _What do I know about it, then,_ she wonders. 

Everyone’s distracted when Will finds Leonard’s real present, a book about boxing, hidden under some debris, (Goodness, how must I come across, Leonard says, affronted- you thought I got you a framed photograph of Marlon Brando for your birthday?) and the party winds down (she catches Will watching his own birthday party from outside, through the window. Sidney was strange but he was never _that_ strange. He would at least go out for a smoke if he really wanted some alone time) and she goes home, then, at the same time as the Keatings, Leonard helping her into her coat. He almost can’t meet her eye.

“Thank you, Mrs C,” he tells her, his voice tremulous and full. If she speaks she’ll give herself away, so she just nods at him and hurries out to where Jack’s warming up the car.

As they pull out the driveway she sees Mr Marlowe silhouetted in the doorway against the blue night, leaning against the frame, and- just before the car turns the corner- Leonard moving in for an embrace.

_In love. Happy._

She’s proud of him.


End file.
